Forum
Geographies of outer space:Progress and new opportunities
Oliver DunnettQueen’s University Belfast, UK
Andrew S. MaclarenUniversity of Aberdeen, UK
Julie KlingerBoston University, USA
K. Maria D. LaneUniversity of New Mexico, USA
Daniel SageLoughborough University, UK
AbstractResearch into outer space has burgeoned in recent years, through the work of scholars in the social sciences,arts and humanities. Geographers have made a series of useful contributions to this emergent work, butscholarship remains fairly limited in comparison to other disciplinary fields. This forum explains the scholarlyroots of these new geographies of outer space, considering why and how geographies of outer space couldmake further important contributions. The forum invites reflections from political, environmental, historicaland cultural geographers to show how human geography can present future avenues to continued scho-larship into outer space.
Keywordsculture, environment, geography, history, labour, outer space, politics
I Introduction
Human geographers have begun to re-engage
with outer space as an object of their research.
Much of this work has drawn inspiration from a
landmark paper by Denis Cosgrove (1994),
which examined the Apollo astronaut
photographs of the earth from space, and their
significance in the genealogy of the global
imagination in western culture. Cosgrove
thereby opened up extra-terrestrial perspectives
in contemporary studies of geographical repre-
sentations. A further significant intervention
Corresponding author:Oliver Dunnett, Department of Geography, School ofNatural and Built Environment, Queen’s UniversityBelfast, University Road, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK.Email: [email protected]
Progress in Human Geography1–23
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was Fraser MacDonald’s (2007) paper in this
journal, which argued that outer space should
no longer be seen as remote and detached from
the everyday geographies of people’s lives, as it
has become instrumental to many modern tech-
nologies and forms of mobility. Such lines of
argument have echoed more recently, with Jason
Beery (2016: 68) suggesting that geographers
should ‘reject . . . anxieties about engaging with
outer space’, and grasp the opportunities therein.
Indeed, outer space matters, and its engage-
ment through critical voices in the humanities
and social sciences has become more important
with the increasing presence of outer space tech-
nologies in people’s everyday lives (Johnson,
2016), the growing diversity of human activity
in outer space, with private companies
described to be launching ‘a new space race’
(Grady, 2017), and the imaginative configura-
tions of outer space that continue to shape
human understandings of the universe, influ-
enced by unprecedented developments in astro-
physical science (NASA, 2017). With
geography specifically meaning ‘earth writing’,
some may wonder why there is a need for geo-
graphies of outer space. Yet outer space and
geography have historic connections, from the
ages of Classical and Medieval cosmography up
until Alexander Von Humboldt’s Cosmos
(1849). We argue that outer space should be of
pressing concern within contemporary human
geography given the increasing prominence of
outer space within culture and politics, and the
need to fully contextualize this. Human geogra-
phers are well-placed to draw on a breadth of
conceptual developments from its range of sub-
disciplinary perspectives, including an estab-
lished engagement with concepts of scale
(Sheppard and McMaster, 2004), and a post-
modern cultural turn that has created the possi-
bility for ‘an extra-terrestrial human geography’
(Cosgrove, 2008: 47). With the rise of planetary
geomorphology in physical geography (Crad-
dock, 2012) and interdisciplinary science
(Mackwell et al., 2013), as well as significant
new studies on outer space in history, sociology
and anthropology (Geppert, 2012; Dickens and
Ormrod, 2016; Messeri, 2016), there is a com-
pelling need for human geographers to catch up
with this ‘turn to space’ and the diverse influ-
ences outer space has had, and is having, on
earth and its inhabitants.
What form, then, might such new geogra-
phies of outer space take, and how might we
theorize engagements that have already started
to emerge? One starting point would be to think
through specific geographical terminologies
and how they might apply to studies of outer
space. The most obvious connection, noted by
MacDonald (2007), is the term ‘space’ itself, a
homonym that denotes both the most widely-
adopted ‘unit of geography’ and also the cosmic
void between planetary and other cosmic bodies,
drawing on notions of absence, vacuity or noth-
ingness. Space, however, is too vague a term for
the immensity and diversity of the cosmic realm,
and adopting more specific geographical terms
such as place, surface, environment, volume, tra-
jectory or landscape could open up the multipli-
city of meanings behind these varied and distinct
extra-terrestrial spaces. This approach also gen-
erates a whole range of outer-space-specific ter-
minologies and nomenclatures as possible
objects of study. Thinking through the nuances
of the ‘spaces of outer space’ through terms such
as extra-terrestrial or extra-global space, earth-
orbital space (involving polar, parabolic or
geostationary trajectories), interplanetary space,
exo-planetary space, interstellar or celestial
space, the cosmos, or even the heavens, invokes
a variety of scales and understandings to help
unpick and focus in on particular objects of study.
What these suggestions offer is a specific lexicon
for geographers to take forward in future research
to critically interpret these different spaces, think-
ing beyond the simplistic binary separation of
‘outer’ space from ‘terrestrial’ space.
Geographers’ limited involvement with outer
space has occurred mostly through critical geo-
politics, or ‘critical astropolitics’, interrogating
2 Progress in Human Geography XX(X)
terrestrial power relations embedded in space-
flight industries (Warf, 2007; Collis, 2009;
Beery, 2012), space-promoting organizations
(MacDonald, 2007; Dunnett, 2017), and outer
space in popular culture (MacDonald, 2008).
The significance of national space programmes
(Sage, 2014) or outer space cultures (Dunnett,
2012) has also shown the entwined nature of
outer space with national identities and
military-industrial complexes. Recent develop-
ments afford geographers further possibilities
for study, with newly-industrialized nations
becoming increasingly involved with space-
flight (Pace, 2015) and new private sector
engagements with research, development and
manufacturing disrupting Cold War-era con-
cepts of nationalism in outer space. With exist-
ing studies often focusing on the national and
global politics of outer space, there has been a
comparative lack of research on the localized
political and economic geographies of produc-
tion embedded in the newly-emergent space
industries. In this forum, Daniel Sage looks to
address this shortfall by articulating geometries
of power and dispossession inherent in the
labour geographies of upcoming space projects
that operate in contrast to the utopian visions of
‘NewSpace’ magnates such as Elon Musk.
Cosgrove’s landmark paper (1994) helped
establish the significance of space imagery in
engendering a sense of environmental unity in
the earth. Subsequent studies have expanded the
concept of ‘environment’ beyond earthly limits,
considering, for example, representations of the
planet Mars in the early and late 20th century
(Lane, 2011; Dittmer, 2007). Researchers have
also examined how earth-orbital imagery, rock-
etry and planetary visualization have helped to
configure a sense of frontier expansionism
through narratives of discovery and exploration
(Sage, 2014; MacDonald, 2015). Such studies
have investigated the connections between
humans and the extra-terrestrial environment,
but have only made limited progress in compar-
ison to the multitude of ways in which people
have understood off-world spaces in various
national, regional and local contexts. Thinking
through the meaning of earth’s place in the cos-
mos raises broader questions regarding the lim-
its of human influence in the solar system, and
the role of humanity in safeguarding environ-
mental futures in the long term. In the forum
contributions that follow, Julie Klinger and
Maria Lane seek to address these issues by con-
figuring potential new geographies of nature-
culture relations in outer space, through both
contemporary and historical research, looking
at examples such as off-earth mining and the
mapping of other planets.
Part of MacDonald’s (2007) argument in pro-
moting the study of outer space was to draw
attention to the terrestrial geographies that are
connected to the technologies and discourses of
outer space. Others have shown how certain
places on earth, such as the Antarctic continent,
mountains and deserts, have been seen as
proxies of extra-terrestrial spaces (Collis,
2016; Lane, 2008; Dittmer, 2007). This work
makes significant progress in understanding
geographies of outer space through earthly ana-
logy. There is, however, further scope for stud-
ies that investigate the more accessible and
everyday spaces through which people derive
meaning from outer space. In the penultimate
section of this forum, Oliver Dunnett examines
how landscapes of outer space have been
articulated through popular representations
and experience, seeking also to configure the
moral geographies of outer space in popular
understandings. Finally, Andrew Maclaren
examines the concept of affective nationalism
in the contemporary context of NASA space
shuttle exhibits in various museum spaces
across the United States, thinking through how
‘space heritage’ has become a major focus in
everyday narratives of human engagement
with outer space.
This brief overview has pointed out a signif-
icant but underdeveloped corpus of work in the
new geographies of outer space that has
Dunnett et al. 3
emerged in the past decade or so. This work has
intervened successfully in areas such as critical
astropolitics, planetary environmentalism and
earth-space analogies, in explaining various
human understandings of the cosmos. These
interventions, and those that follow in the main
sections of this forum, seek to take advantage of
geography’s unique traditions and perspectives
in understanding the spaces of outer space, and
what they mean to people on earth in various
social, cultural and economic contexts. In an era
in which human interactions with outer space
are only likely to develop, such perspectives are
all the more important.
Oliver Dunnett
Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Andrew S. Maclaren
University of Aberdeen, UK
II Labour geographies of the spaceage: Astro-capitalist organizingand its alternatives
In 2007 NASA’s now Deputy Chief Historian,
Glen Asner, drew attention to how ‘individuals
on the lowest rung of the employment ladder’
(Asner, 2007: 393) had, despite their work con-
structing and maintaining launch facilities, pro-
ducing experimental technologies, and ensuring
safety in high-risk conditions, been consistently
marginalized in scholarly histories of space
exploration. Read against the sub-discipline of
labour geography (Castree, 2007; Herod, 1997),
this inattention to the daily lives and experi-
ences of space workers, as opposed to senior
managers and politicians, cannot be regarded
as insignificant. Rather, it reveals and reinforces
a recurrent vision that the significance of space-
flight is determined by forces of capital, not
labour (cf. Herod, 1997). As such, space explo-
ration can be variously understood as: a catalyst
to drive consumer, manufacturing and manage-
rial innovation (Johnson, 2016), a place to
extract resources (Capova, 2016), and a way
to train globally competitive knowledge work-
ers while creating new ‘off world’ consumers,
such as space tourists (Beery, 2012). We might
celebrate this vision like Jeff Bezos, Amazon
founder, CEO and space booster, as a ‘huge
dynamic entrepreneurial explosion in space’
(quoted in Davenport, 2016) or lament it as a
pernicious ‘up scaling’ of the over-
accumulation crises, and social inequalities, of
terrestrial capitalism (Dickens and Ormrod,
2007; MacDonald, 2007). But either way, the
future of space exploration, which, for Bezos
and other space entrepreneurs, often appears
as our only future, appears increasingly deter-
mined by capital.
While space capitalists like Bezos are
undoubtedly gripped by multiple, even conflict-
ing, visions for space exploration, including
species survival, colonialism, and libertarian
politics, what seems certain is that ‘they cannot
imagine exchange and social relations outside
the framework of capitalism and profit; it is the
basis for human sociality in space’ (Valentine,
2012: 1061). However, as Valentine (2012) sug-
gests, critically-minded social scientists should
avoid simply echoing, and thus naturalizing,
this astro-capitalist teleology in their critiques.
In what follows I propose that one way of open-
ing up astro-capitalism is to challenge the
assumption that space workers function as a
passive appendage to the organization of
astro-capitals. Far too often the agency of labour
in shaping astro-capitalism and other space
futures remains invisible, or else, as with Wills’
rare study of space labour, is figured as subser-
vient to ‘powerful forces . . . [of] . . . capital’
(2016: 118). My call here for labour geogra-
phies of the space age focusses upon the poten-
tial for further examination of how the agency
of space labour (Herod, 1997) is relationally
afforded a certain autonomy from capital to
cope with, rework, even resist, astro-
capitalism – spanning actualized and potential,
terrestrial and extra-terrestrial, geographies.
Such a line of inquiry is vital if we are, as many
4 Progress in Human Geography XX(X)
critically minded scholars propose (e.g. Dickens
and Ormrod, 2007; Valentine, 2012), to under-
stand and resist the foreclosing of the future by
astro-capitalists. To be clear, I am not proposing
that capital does not shape uneven economic
geographies related to space travel but rather
that it is not the only, or even sometimes most
significant, influence. Drawing reference to
workers in and around NASA, I will now sketch
out two strands of enquiry into how we might
develop such labour geographies.
First, labour geographers have consistently
stressed how the agency of labour has repro-
duced itself at sites of production, helping to
enable the production of uneven capitalist eco-
nomic geographies (Castree, 2007). In contrast,
analyses of the relationship between space and
uneven terrestrial economic geographies have
tended to exclusively focus on its determination
by capital: from the use of satellite tracking to
optimize the profit margins of multi-national
shipping corporations moving raw materials
from the Global South to the North, to the avail-
ability of satellite communication to support the
high-speed trading of global financial centres
(MacDonald, 2007).
To gain sight of the agencies of labour in the
production of these uneven geographies, we
might consider labour at space production facil-
ities, specifically individuals such as Jean Alex-
ander, NASA’s last directly-employed
spacesuit technician at Kennedy Space Center.
Interviewed in 1998 as part of NASA’s oral
history program, Jean was responsible for pre-
launch interactions with the space shuttle crews
during launch and return. The checking proce-
dures Jean carried out on helmets, pressure suits
and straps were vital to the success of dozens of
commercial, military and scientific satellite
launches. Strikingly, Jean describes how these
crucial, yet painstakingly exacting, procedures
were accompanied by light-hearted camarad-
erie, fun and practical jokes. It is difficult to read
Jean’s recollections of how she and her col-
leagues relieved boredom, stress and tension
by tricking astronauts, as entirely passive to the
flow of capital into outer space or as part of a
false consciousness (Jean is highly critical of the
increasing use of private subcontractors in
NASA during the 1990s). If Jean did not ward
off boredom, or anxiety, this might not only lead
to a mistake which could endanger a
multimillion-dollar satellite owned by a media
corporation (and thus her career), but might
compromise a workplace that fosters the repro-
duction of emotionally rewarding self and group
identities and agencies. The affective encoun-
ters and atmospheres reported by Jean appear as
an ingredient in both her own and her col-
leagues’ self-reproduction and the reproduction
of astro-capitalism. Similar accounts of the
affective registers that helped workers cope
with monotonous and pressurized work in and
around NASA can be found within NASA’s
growing oral history collection, popular films
such as Theodore Melfi’s 2016 release, Hidden
Figures, as well as scholarly accounts
(McCurdy, 1993; Faherty, 2002). Labour geo-
graphers, and other labour scholars, might build
on these brief accounts of space labour in the
workplace with primary research that examines
how the uneven economic geographies of astro-
capitalism are bound up with the circulation of
labouring affects, identities and agencies.
Secondly, labour geographers have long been
concerned with how groups of workers can for-
mally organize their interests and agendas in the
workplace to rework and resist capitalist modes
of production (Herod, 1997). While labour
agency is certainly not pre-determined to
rework and resist capital, the workplace remains
an important site for geographers to identify and
understand how labour agency can be collec-
tively organized along these lines. To glimpse
the significance of such collective organizing
we might consider the United Launch Alliance
(ULA), which employs over 3400 skilled work-
ers at two sites in Alabama and Texas, in addi-
tion to thousands more employees across its
global supply chain. ULA’s production site in
Dunnett et al. 5
Decatur, Alabama, alone employs 850 people.
ULA is a joint venture formed from the long-
established, and rival, space divisions of Lock-
heed Martin and Boeing, which have since 2006
had a 100 per cent success rate in launching
unmanned Atlas and Delta rockets for NASA,
the Department of Defence and commercial
customers.
The majority of ULA staff at Decatur and
elsewhere are represented by the International
Association of Machinists and Aerospace
Workers Local Lodge 44. While Lodge 44 has
struggled in recent years to mobilize its mem-
bers to strike to oppose a professed degradation
of pay and conditions at ULA (purportedly due
to resistance from members at ULA launch sites
outside Decatur that are less affected by recent
contract changes), it has become increasingly
critical of one strand of astro-capitalism. Spe-
cifically, Lodge 44 has sought to challenge the
rise of SpaceX, a commercial space launch
company of 5000 largely non-unionized
employees owned and run by PayPal owner
Elon Musk.
Since its formation in 2002, SpaceX has
sought to compete with ULA on price terms –
the cost of a SpaceX Falcon 9 satellite launch is
$60 million versus the lowest ULA launch cost
of $164 million (Grush, 2016). Musk’s utopian
vision for SpaceX centres around a drive to
‘make space flight accessible to almost anyone’
(quoted in CBS News, 2016). However, since
2010, Falcon 9 has experienced two full launch
failures. After the Falcon 9 launch failure on 1
September 2016, Lodge 44 argued, via its publicly-
accessible Facebook site, that SpaceX had over-
worked its employees to produce cheaper, yet
dangerous, rocket technologies. Lodge 44’s list
of criticisms against SpaceX included ‘several
lawsuits filed against them from employees that
claim to have had to work off the clock to stay
employed, unfair terminations, ignoring the Cal
WARN Act [a piece of California legislation
protecting workers from mass layoffs], and
working their employees 60–80 hours per week
without rest or meal breaks’ (Lodge 44, 2016).
Such concerns are supported by comments
made by a current SpaceX engineer explaining
how: ‘If you believe that a task should take a
year then Elon wants it done in a week. . . . Of
course reality kicks in and either junk product
gets flown or something terrible happens’
(Anon, 2016).
The critique of SpaceX articulated by Lodge
44 revolves around a vision of space exploration
that is explicitly at odds with the form of astro-
capitalism effected by space entrepreneurs such
as Bezos and Musk. Lodge 44 argue that the
extreme complexities and risks inherent to
space exploration can only be translated into
opportunities, to whatever end, if the agencies
and interests of labour are protected by what
reads like a well-balanced, and monopolistic,
military-industrial-union complex. Put simply,
entrepreneurial work intensification and precar-
ity is not an effective way to realize spaceflight.
Intriguingly, this labour-orientated, if techno-
cratically astro-capitalist, vision of spaceflight
appears complicated by a recent security
demand to ULA by the US government that it
replace the Russian built RD180 engines used in
its Atlas V rocket with a US design – the agreed
supplier of the new engine is Blue Origin, a
company owned by Jeff Bezos. Lodge 44 has,
thus far, remained quiet on their efforts to assure
that Blue Origin and Bezos are aligned with
their espoused vision of space travel.
The two examples of labour geographies that
I have discussed here provide a necessarily lim-
ited illustration of the significance of labour
agencies to both enable, rework, and even resist,
astro-capitalist ways of organizing space travel.
Astro-capitalism remains one of the most
potent, and potentially pernicious, conduits in
which totalizing futures of uneven economic
geographies, including labour geographies, are
worked upon, and closed, in advance of their
realization. As a minimum, the development
of labour geographies of the space age can pre-
vent these teleologies from appearing as
6 Progress in Human Geography XX(X)
pre-determined by structural forces of capital.
More progressively, research can help us under-
stand how outer space, as a societal-level future
imaginary, can be harnessed, as with Lodge 44,
to rework and resist future work precarity and
intensification. In either case, what is distinc-
tive, and salient, about such labour geographies
is how they can shed light on the ways in which
future agential capacities, not just current abil-
ities, of labour are being shaped far beyond the
space industry itself. To this end, it is also
important to stress that while my arguments
here have developed around a labour geography
of singular, formal workplaces and largely
class-based interests, labour geographers could
also undertake analyses that consider global pro-
duction networks, as well as sites of informal
work, care and consumption, and intersectional-
ities with class and race, gender, nationality, dis-
ability, sexuality and religion (e.g. Sage, 2014;
Valentine, 2012). At its core my proposal for the
development of labour geographies of the space
age stems from a simple recognition that, cur-
rently at least, the realization of spaceflight is
impossible without a diverse human labour. By
developing geographies of the experiences,
desires and voices of this labour we can start to
understand more precisely the diversity of lives
and socialites that are being brought into being,
or not, under the promises of the space age.
Daniel Sage
Loughborough University, UK
III Environmental geography andouter space: Pollution and naturalresources
The human-environment interactions that lie at
the heart of environmental geography are not
confined to the spaces within our atmosphere.
In the contexts of intensifying climate change
impacts and protracted armed conflicts, outer
space is being reimagined as an ecosystem in
which human activities could be supported
beyond earth (Messeri, 2016). With our dis-
courses, property right regimes and material
practices, we are transforming outer space into
a contested terrain in which peace, violence,
enclosure, and accumulation are all possible.
This commentary briefly presents some of these
key discourses and practices, and makes the case
for an environmental geography of outer space.
1 Discourses and imaginaries
Although human imaginings of off-earth envir-
ons have a long and storied history (e.g. Lane,
2011), key contemporary discourses wield an
unprecedented political potency. These typically
include one or more of the following elements:
1. Humans (of which there are too many)
have polluted the earth beyond repair
(e.g. Pelton, 2016);
2. Intensifying resource scarcity is making
life unlivable on this planet and is con-
demning us to perpetual war (e.g. West-
ing, 2013);
3. The solutions lie in colonizing outer space,
because the infinite expanse of the cosmos
holds an infinite quantity of resources and
possibilities, which are free for exploitation
by the brightest and boldest of the human
race (e.g. Dolman, 2016).
In the majority of these discourses, near-term
earthly apocalypse and/or human extinction is
inevitable. This seemingly peculiar blend of
eschatology and cornucopianism is not unique
to space mavens. It has been a familiar trope in
the imperialist adventures driving global envi-
ronmental change over the past five hundred
years (Richards, 2003). The colonial frontiers
of the past were conjured in contrast to the
crowded and degraded lands of Western Eur-
ope, where social inequalities had immiserated
millions at the dawn of the industrial revolution.
Observing this, urban elites concluded that the
world was heading towards a population-
induced Malthusian disaster. The salvation of
Dunnett et al. 7
civilization was to be found in conquering the
resource frontiers of the Americas, Africa, and
Australasia. Whatever already existed there was
fit only for sacrifice to the ‘greater good’ of
colonial civilization. The imaginaries of fron-
tiers and sacrifice zones continue to be key fea-
tures of globalization processes (Tsing, 2005),
and, I would argue, a central feature of our drive
to colonize extra-global space.
In our age of intractable global challenges,
environmentally-inflected arguments in favour
of space exploration possess a compelling logic.
To wit: if pollution and resource scarcity are at
the heart of so much conflict on earth, why not
send our waste to outer space while harvesting
the infinite resources of the cosmos (Zabarah,
2015)? In a slightly different vein: if regulation
and social issues pose barriers to investment and
extraction on earth, why not move extractive
industries to entirely unpopulated places
beyond our terrestrial home (Lamb, 2010)?
Perhaps it is because these imaginaries rely
on familiar colonial logics that these discourses
have found sympathetic audiences in elite polit-
ical, scientific, and financial circles. Some of
the many results have been a renewed popular
fascination with colonizing Mars, new legisla-
tive practices that empower private enterprises
intent on exploiting outer space, and the chan-
nelling of massive sums of capital to support a
nascent global ‘NewSpace’ industry (Valentine,
2012; Martin, 2014). The contemporary
arrangement of power and technology lends
fantastic space exploration narratives an unpre-
cedented air of possibility.
2 Governing the ‘free gifts’ of the cosmos
The physical, legal and logistical realities gov-
erning human engagement with outer space
should serve to temper these fantastic dis-
courses. The ‘free gifts’ of the cosmos are in
fact governed by robust treaty regimes. Our
capacity to exploit the ‘infinity’ of outer space
is mediated by geographical factors such as
location and access (MacDonald, 2007). Even
in the supposedly consequence-free terrain
offered by the immensity of outer space, we
must reckon with the environmental outcomes
of our actions. How we relate to our environ-
ments is defined by a diverse array of practices
enacted over time through contingent processes
shaped by multiple competing forms of power.
In other words, outer space is in no small part
what we make of it. The first 50 years of space
exploration proceeded under terms very differ-
ent from the colonialist extractivism that had
defined the preceding centuries and has re-
emerged this decade. According to Article 1 of
the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), any data
gathered in the course of outer space research is
legally enshrined as the ‘province of all
[hu]mankind’ (United Nations, 1967). No part
of outer space can be claimed as the exclusive
domain of any state or entity, and any use of
outer space whatsoever must be for peaceful
purposes. According to the 1984 Moon Agree-
ment, any resource extraction must be governed
by the international community and carried out
in a way that takes the interest of all of humanity
into account, with special emphasis on the needs
and interests of developing countries (United
Nations, 1984).
The OST is among the most robust scientific
treaty regimes in the contemporary era, with
124 signatories including all space-faring pow-
ers. Yet it may prove to be a temporary article.
Recent legislative developments in the US and
Luxembourg officially recognize the private
property rights of their citizenry to outer space
resources (114–90, Public Law, 2015; l’Econo-
mie, 2016). This legislation is one example of
how outer space can be transformed from ‘the
common heritage of all [hu]mankind’ to a pri-
vatized frontier for capitalist accumulation by a
shifting set of ideas empowered by changing
political economies. By opening up outer space
to private property rights, states can stake terri-
torial claims through other means. In outer
space, as on earth, political economy is a driving
8 Progress in Human Geography XX(X)
force of land use change, even if we are not
referring to ‘land’ in the terrestrial sense.
3 The physical limits of infinity
In this new, exploitation-driven space race, it is
not uncommon to encounter claims that the infi-
nite expanse of the cosmos affords infinite
opportunities for both accumulation and pollu-
tion. After all, the sheer quantity of mineral
resources in outer space is staggering, and it
would be physically impossible for human was-
tefulness to fill outer space in the manner that
we have overburdened air, sea, and land on
earth. In this way, outer space is framed as the
ultimate sacrifice zone. Not only is it thought of
as an uninhabited immensity that can be used
and polluted as much as humanly possible, the
fact that it is infinite is taken to mean that human
activities will not have any meaningful conse-
quences (Klinger, 2017).
These discourses are common among NewS-
pace industries, investors, and advocates, but
they demonstrate a rather serious scientific illit-
eracy. Most basically, the infinity of the cosmos
is unavoidably mediated by our place-based
engagement with it. Space may be infinite, but
we are not. This fundamental fact structures our
behaviour. Our bodies and our technologies are
always located in specific places, and therefore
produce geographies that, however expansive,
are nevertheless limited in space and time.
Infinity has a geography, and one aspect of
that geography is environmental. An example of
this is the orbital debris surrounding earth. Cur-
rently, half a million pieces of space junk clutter
earth orbits, posing dangers to the international
space station, satellites and new space launches
(Damjanov, 2015). Traveling at speeds of up to
28,000 km per hour, an item the size of a small
screw could seriously damage or disable other
space vehicles. This highlights the vulnerabil-
ity of human beings and technologies in outer
space. The debris generated by the first
decades of space exploration constrains the
already limited number of exit and re-entry
routes for new space launches and limits access
to orbital pathways for future space-faring
powers (NRC, 2011). The state of affairs raises
questions of historical responsibility for con-
tamination and remediation of our immediate
near-earth environment. Like the oceans and
the atmosphere, once thought to be too
immense to be affected by human activity,
even the infinity of outer space cannot provide
an infinite dumping ground.
Whether our engagement with outer space
holds promise or peril for our species is not deter-
mined by outer space itself. As with earthly envir-
ons, the immensity of a given place or the
abundance of a given resource does not, by its
mere existence, offer salvation or condemnation.
What matters is how specific places and resources
are valorized, by whom, and towards what ends.
4 An environmental geography of outerspace
These circumstances charge an environmental
geography of outer space with three primary pur-
poses, which align with the broader objectives of
critical geography (Peake and Sheppard, 2014).
The first is disciplinary. Environmental geogra-
phy is concerned with the processes and practices
that define human-environment interactions. As
such, it is an expansive and diversely-populated
‘middle ground’ (Castree et al., 2009) in which
specialists in physical and human geography take
different approaches to common concerns. One
need not look far to realize that an environmental
geography of outer space must necessarily be
both wide-ranging and specific. It not only con-
cerns specific places and environments beyond
our atmosphere which we engage either directly
or via robotic surrogates, but also our terrestrial
practices that inform our engagement with outer
space and shape our conceptions of what it is
useful for.
The second purpose is empirical. Environ-
mental geographers have been at the forefront
Dunnett et al. 9
of interrogating the nature-culture paradigm,
uncovering how ideas of nature shape our rela-
tionship to it in concrete ways. Over the past
decades, this has transformed the ways we edu-
cate younger generations and formulate programs
for change. Policy and physics are equally critical
factors governing our engagement with outer
space. Also important is the state of science and
technology, cultural trends, and capital flows.
These myriad factors are concrete, knowable,
specific and subject to intervention. At a time
when the terms of human engagement with outer
space are being transformed by militarist and
accumulationist interests, empirical engagement
with the spaces of outer space as we imagine and
produce them is urgently needed.
This leads to the third purpose, which is ethi-
cal. Many environmental geographers are dri-
ven by an ethos to uncover how injustices are
reproduced through the discourses and practices
with which we transform our physical environ-
ment. Despite clear physical differences, outer
space environments are like earthly environ-
ments insofar as there is no place where destruc-
tion is ethically unambiguous or pollution is
truly consequence-free. This invites both epis-
temological and ontological inquiries into how
environmental geography clarifies our relation-
ship to outer space, and likewise how our mul-
tiple relationships to outer space might improve
rather than normalize the geographies of envi-
ronmental injustice we are producing on earth.
It is precisely this ethos that makes an environ-
mental geography of outer space both timely
and necessary.
Julie Klinger
Boston University, USA
IV Historical geographies of outerspace: knowledge, imagination,nature
Although many engagements with outer space
have focused on futuristic concerns with space
travel, exploration, and the potential for human
settlement beyond earth, there are clear avenues
for productively engaging with outer space geo-
graphies from a historical standpoint. Recent
scholarship in historical geography, in fact, takes
up numerous themes that could be directly
applied to outer space, helping ground current
debates and decisions within a longer intellectual
history and remedying unfortunate assumptions
that outer space is a mere side-note to terrestrial
history. This essay traces several relevant trends
in recent historical-geographic research to illus-
trate the dividends that would accrue from their
application to outer space geographies.
1 Geographies of knowledge
Historical geographers have now spent two
decades exploring past ‘geographies of knowl-
edge’ (see Offen, 2012, for an outline). Primar-
ily, this line of work involves leveraging
insights from colleagues in science and technol-
ogy studies (STS) to critically examine the ways
that people and institutions produce truth, at
different times and in different places. It
requires excavating social contexts, parsing the
components of expertise, and tracing the acts of
negotiation, translation, or witnessing that
determine whether knowledge claims come to
be considered ‘true’.
Although the roots of the STS intellectual
tradition lie in sociology, geographers have
made significant contributions by illuminating
the spatial patterns that animate knowledge pro-
duction and scientific truth claims. Using
Livingstone’s (2003) concepts of ‘site’, ‘region’
and ‘circulation’, historical geographers have
focused productively not only on individual
sites of scientific work, but also on the broader
regional geographies of scientific institutions
and networks, as well as the spatial pathways
and networks along which scientific claims
travel (Powell, 2007; Finnegan, 2008).
This line of inquiry clearly has much to con-
tribute to outer space geographies, especially in
10 Progress in Human Geography XX(X)
historical terms. Despite the existence of some
excellent works that critically consider histori-
cal and modern contexts of outer space knowl-
edge production (Markley, 2005; Vertesi, 2015;
Messeri, 2016), very few have yet explicitly
considered the geographies of outer space
knowledge production (Dittmer, 2007; Lane,
2011). Given the sheer scale of the scientific
programs undertaken to visit and/or photograph
celestial bodies in the last century, however, it
stands to reason that historical investigators
should critically investigate their geographical
dimensions. From the marshalling of extensive
financial and human resources, to the coordina-
tion of numerous research teams, and to the
control and staging of publicity events, the pro-
duction of outer space knowledge claims is
clearly defined by vivid geographies of site,
region, and circulation. Historical geographers
are leading much of the theoretical development
in geographies of science and are thus well
placed to deepen current understanding of outer
space geographies.
2 Geographic imaginations
Although historical geographers have certainly
embraced (and built on) STS methods that prior-
itize attention to the mechanics and logics of
scientific knowledge production, the sub-
discipline has also remained steadfastly com-
mitted to the core humanistic imperative of
tracing meaning. In this work, historical geogra-
phy intersects with other disciplines such as lit-
erary studies, cultural geography, and the
history of cartography to explore ‘geographic
imaginations’ and their meanings in different
times and places.
In tracing the intersection of historical geo-
graphies of meaning with historical geographies
of knowledge, we turn inevitably to the role of
maps and cartography as imaginative agents.
Critical histories of cartography have convin-
cingly shown that map production, circulation,
and consumption must be viewed as expressions
of power even as they purport to represent real-
ity (Harley, 1988; Cosgrove, 1999). Historical
geographers have incorporated these insights in
two ways. First, they have engaged in critical
analyses of the cultures of cartography and the
role of maps in a variety of historical and mod-
ern institutions. From nation-building to land
management to the control of indigenous land-
scapes, maps play a powerful discursive role
that goes far beyond innocent representation
and acts to produce and discipline new realities
(e.g. Kirsch, 2002; Roth, 2008). Second, his-
torical geographers have also started to more
critically consider the nature of their own
mapmaking and the powers it wields in the
world. Recent works have wrestled with ques-
tions of how to undertake historical cartogra-
phy in ways that open multiple ways of
understanding past landscapes and experi-
ences, rather than presenting them as incon-
testable or determined by the mapmaker
(Crampton, 2009; Pearce, 2012).
Outer space geographies could benefit from
these multiple approaches for exploring geo-
graphic imaginations. Since well before celes-
tial bodies were considered physically
reachable, outer space geographies have been
explored through fiction and via visual technol-
ogies. More recently, cartography has become a
primary form of recording, analysing and pre-
senting knowledge about outer space, in turn
influencing fictional engagements with the
spaces of outer space. Productive historical geo-
graphies of outer space, then, would examine
these past episodes of mapmaking and
meaning-making, tracing the multiple geogra-
phical imaginations at work. The early maps
of Mars, for instance, were produced by small
communities of expert astronomers and con-
sumed by broad public audiences whose carto-
graphic literacy allowed them to equate claims
about Martian landscapes with those emanating
from European colonial realms. Fierce public
interest and debate in the Mars maps then dis-
rupted some of the astronomical community’s
Dunnett et al. 11
emerging professional norms, creating a com-
plex episode of knowledge production that
defies the false conceptual divide between ‘sci-
entific’ and ‘popular’ geographies and imagina-
tions (Lane, 2011).
In thus excavating the underlying political
and economic geographies that animate human
interest in outer space, or even by engaging in
alternate cartographies of outer space, historical
geographers could help us move past current
narratives that prioritize technoscientific studies
as ‘correct’ and fictional engagements as ‘ima-
ginative’. Instead, we should investigate the
ways that both types of knowledge production
are imaginative and are used to make meaning,
leveraging these insights to influence current
agendas and imaginations.
3 Nature-society geographies
One of the most provocative areas of geographic
imagination – in historical geographic scholar-
ship and also in the study of outer space – con-
cerns the relationship between nature and
society. Historical geography has long focused
on the environment, tracing not only the past
states of specific environmental features (as is
still the focus of environmental history) but also
the past states of human-environment interac-
tions, nature-society paradigms, and environ-
mental knowledge (Naylor, 2006). The most
recent historical geography work in this vein
takes two related pathways: one concerned with
‘environmental imaginations and change under
colonialism and imperialism’ (Offen, 2012:
532), and another concerned very specifically
with ‘the meaning of climate and climate
change’ (Offen, 2014: 476).
Engaging with political ecology, historical
geographers have chronicled the ways that colo-
nial and imperial institutions functioned in the
past not only to control peoples and environ-
ments, but also to thoroughly rewrite the rules
for environmental engagement and knowledge-
gathering in ways that would themselves
reinforce the control of non-European peoples
(Davis, 2006). The legacies of colonial/imperial
approaches to environment thus linger in ways
that are difficult to trace or challenge, given
their foundational and underlying status in the
modern postcolonial state. With specific regard
to climate, deterministic imaginations have
been used to justify the entirety of imperial and
colonial projects (Livingstone, 2002), and his-
torical geography has recently exploded with a
raft of publications that analyse past ‘cultures of
climate’ to trace the many narratives and mean-
ings that have surrounded human-climate inter-
actions (Daniels and Endfield, 2009; Heymann,
2010).
These efforts have direct importance for the
emerging subfield of outer space geographies,
which merits far greater attention from histori-
cal and critical geographers concerned with cul-
tures and narratives of climate and climate
change. First, many early imaginations of
extra-terrestrial bodies during the ‘telescopic
era’ were concerned with climate, especially
in attempts to divine where potential inhabitants
of the moon or Mars might fit on a climatically-
determined hierarchy of cultures. These early
imaginations, replete with assumptions about
climatic and environmental determinism, show
both that nature-society geographies were
important to understandings of outer space and
that knowledge about outer space participated in
the larger intellectual evolution of nature-
society thinking. Second, more recent historical
imaginations during the ‘satellite era’ have radi-
cally changed human understandings of the
nature-society relationship, primarily by shift-
ing perspective to a location beyond earth. As
Cosgrove (1994) showed, the first images of
earth as seen from space upended beliefs about
the nature-society relationship and ushered in
the first political movements devoted to chang-
ing human impacts at a global scale. Concerns
about human impacts on the earth’s surface are
now regularly reinforced by satellite-based ima-
gery programs that have chronicled the
12 Progress in Human Geography XX(X)
shrinking of the Aral Sea, for instance, and the
Arctic ice cap. Third, current developments in
the ‘Rover era’ reveal that our imaginations of
outer space are fundamentally tied to beliefs
about planetary climate change. NASA’s inves-
tigation of terraforming Mars, for example, pre-
sented a hopeful view of purposefully-
engineered climate change that could make
Mars habitable for humans (Fogg, 1995; McKay
and Marinova, 2001). Furthermore, recent
announcements by SpaceX and Boeing that they
are racing to put humans on Mars are based in a
related, though more dystopian, view that
humans will need an escape hatch in case
earth’s own climate changes irreversibly to a
state that is uninhabitable for humans (Vance,
2015).
The study of outer space geographies is thus
sorely in need of historical scholarship that
chronicles the specific nature-society geogra-
phies that have influenced or governed various
episodes of investigation, exploration, and
claims-making about realms beyond earth’s sur-
face. The elements of this chronicle must focus
not only on the geographic imagination evident
in maps, cartography, imagery and narrative,
but also on the modes, contexts and logics of
knowledge production across multiple sites and
scales of claims-making. From individual astro-
nomical observatories to international academic
conferences to rover mission control rooms to
SpaceX press conferences, outer space geogra-
phies are produced in multiple forms. This
knowledge competes for legitimacy and circu-
lates asymmetrically through myriad networks
that feed back into the imagined ‘body of
knowledge’ that itself constrains the next steps
in producing knowledge and imagination.
Approaches from historical geography can
help illuminate the nature of this intellectual
process and its points of intersection with other
more explicitly political or economic forces.
Historical geographers have been especially
effective at illuminating the power relations that
underlie our landscapes, institutions, and beliefs
about the earth as a human-supporting environ-
ment. There is no reason these same insights
could not be applied to outer space as well. Is
the impulse to expand human settlement to Mars
driven by colonial instincts, or is it based in
globalization ideals that will further challenge
the premise of state-based territorialism? Are
the recent recognitions of a climatic Anthropo-
cene and of non-human agency related to
ongoing identification of a vast heavens beyond
earth? Will access to celestial bodies and land-
scapes be driven by competition, or will it veer
toward cooperation, and to what extent will
these extra-terrestrial engagements open new
imaginative possibilities for social relations in
the terrestrial realm?
Historical-geographic scholarship can pro-
vide the analyses and chronicles that will help
answer these questions and thus help rescue
outer space from mistaken conceptualizations
that it is extra-natural or extra-territorial or
extra-political space. To the extent that this res-
cue can be carried out through stories that are
oriented for public consumption, historical geo-
graphies of outer space have the potential to
make immediate impacts on ongoing public dis-
courses and decisions.
K. Maria D. Lane
University of New Mexico, USA
V Cultures of landscape and themoral geographies of outer space
Two concepts in cultural geography can be use-
fully re-purposed to consider the cultural rele-
vance of outer space in society: cultures of
landscape and moral geographies. In forging
these concepts, cultural geographers have inves-
tigated the ways in which landscape can be
understood not just as a ‘way of seeing’, but also
as an embodied experience of natural and cul-
tural environments. Here, researchers have
investigated how particular landscapes have
been co-constitutive of human cultures, such
Dunnett et al. 13
as in national park spaces (Matless, 1994) or
through night-time outdoor art installations
(Morris, 2011). Concurrently, those investigat-
ing moral geographies have sought to explain
the ways in which certain spaces are assigned
moral and ethical characteristics, and how peo-
ple engage with such spaces through particular
behaviours, enacting certain moral codes
(Livingstone, 2002). Applying these conceptual
engagements to the ‘spaces of outer space’ will
not only help scholars to understand the practi-
cal implications of human and robotic space
exploration but also help us to comprehend
more fully the fundamental relationships
between humankind and the cosmos, especially
in dealing with contemporary questions of
scale, affect and the sublime. Such potential
engagements with the cultural geographies of
outer space shall be explored briefly here
through a number of case studies that deal with
a range of representational and practice-based
cultures including science fictional paintings,
landscape installations and written texts.
1 Landscape and cultures of outer space
When considering outer space, landscape may
not come to mind as a primary register of
thought, perhaps due to its long association with
traditional works of art, in contrast to the hyper-
modern imagery that has characterized the
‘space age’. Furthermore, thinking about outer
space commonly connects with notions of emp-
tiness or blankness, the lack of a sense of verti-
cality and the conventional separation between
ground and sky that traditionally characterizes
landscape. However, there are many ways in
which the conventions of landscape have been
adapted for representing and experiencing outer
space, including through photography and
painting, but also in landscape installations and
public art.
Indeed, perhaps the most famous of all
images of outer space, the Apollo astronaut
photographs of the 1960s and 1970s, have
played with our understandings of landscape
in interesting ways. Looking at the ‘earthrise’
series, taken from orbit around the moon aboard
Apollo 8 in 1968, it is possible to trace the pro-
duction of these photographs to see the ways in
which their orientation and arrangement were
deliberately manufactured to align with land-
scape conventions, thereby familiarizing an oth-
erwise alien place (Cosgrove, 1994). While the
‘earthrise’ series contains undoubtedly some of
the most famous and widely-circulated of the
Apollo images, there are many additional
Apollo photographs that have largely evaded
scholarly interpretation, receiving critical atten-
tion only in the eyes of conspiracy theorists.
Concurrently, historical accounts of Apollo
have largely focused on astronaut narratives,
alongside analyses of space policy or space
hardware (Launius, 2006). Offering a new
opportunity to engage with the Apollo space
photographs, the full collection has recently
been released in high-resolution to an online
Flickr account by space enthusiast Kipp Teague
in collaboration with NASA (Project Apollo
Archive, 2015). It contains many less-known
visions of the moon and earth, such as an
‘earth-set’ image taken from aboard Apollo
17, or Apollo 12 astronauts cast in shadow on
the lunar surface.
Landscape visions of outer space such as the
Apollo photographs were in many ways fore-
shadowed by the science fictional renderings
of space artists such as Chesley Bonestell
(1888–1986) and RA Smith (1905–1959).
Indeed, research by Sage (2014) has demon-
strated how Bonestell’s paintings of imagined
future landscapes of American space explora-
tion were embedded within a particular tradition
of frontier landscape imagery connected to
understandings of the sublime in western art.
Understandings of landscape and the sublime
have also been identified in contemporary
images of outer space taken by the earth-
orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in the 1990s.
Such images, while nominally dispensing with
14 Progress in Human Geography XX(X)
the terrestrial, similarly evoke the sublime in
cosmic features such as the Eagle Nebula’s ‘Pil-
lars of Creation’. Kessler characterizes such
images as ‘Astronomy’s Romantic Land-
scapes’, noting the ways in which Hubble
images ‘bear a striking resemblance to Earthly
geological and meteorological formations’
(2012: 5). In such cases, images of outer space,
whether from high-tech space photography or
imaginative renderings, are valued in relation
to sublime spaces on earth, rather than as evi-
dence of scientific objectivity attained through
transcending terrestrial limits.
Whereas such examples can help us to under-
stand how to deal with landscape imagery of
outer space, other ways of engaging with land-
scape can be brought to bear on the cultural
geographies of outer space. Indeed, geographers
have dealt with the embodied experience of
landscape through practices such as walking
(Wylie, 2005) and nocturnal air travel (Robin-
son, 2013). Similarly, the crafted landscapes of
stately homes and sculpture parks have been
examined as physical manifestations of artistic
and aesthetic values, inviting lived experience
as well as pictorial representation (Daniels,
1982; Warren, 2013). Here, work in the geogra-
phies of outer space can engage with particular
types of landscape designed to help in the public
understanding of the cosmos. Echoing the
assumed intentions of Neolithic sites such as
Stonehenge in southern England, one example
of such a ‘landscape of outer space’ is Armagh
Observatory Astropark in Northern Ireland, a
landscape park designed to encourage visitors
to reflect on cosmic concepts of scale, distance
and the composition of the universe. Here, a
combination of sculptural forms and land art
have been incorporated into the historic Obser-
vatory’s grounds, such as the logarithmically-
arranged ‘Hill of Infinity’ and a ‘Human Orrery’
in which visitors can embody the movement of
celestial objects. This type of understanding of
landscape can help demonstrate the relevance of
cultural geography to making sense of outer
space, and the variety of ways in which land-
scapes of outer space can be interpreted through
embodied experience.
2 Moral geographies of outer space
In many ways outer space can be considered as a
moral or ethical space, whether this refers to the
act of human space exploration, or affective
encounters with outer space that people have
on earth. This can be seen in 20th-century sci-
entific, literary and philosophical debates about
space exploration, as well as in broader ques-
tions on the moral claims of scientific progress.
One of the few sustained critics of human space
exploration in the 20th century was the author
and scholar CS Lewis (1898–1963). In a series
of interventions in fictional, academic and epis-
tolary texts, Lewis explained how the onset of
space exploration could be seen in terms of an
immoral extension of modern science to outer
space (Dunnett, forthcoming). Lewis criticized
this modern conception of empty, blank ‘space’,
with all its imperial connotations, in favour of
an earlier, medieval understanding of the cos-
mos as a realm of harmony and spirituality. In
1954 Lewis had the opportunity to discuss these
views with one of the most prominent pro-space
advocates of the age, Arthur C Clarke (1917–
2008), when they met in an Oxford pub with
Lewis’s colleague JRR Tolkien and Clarke’s
associate in the British Interplanetary Society,
Arthur ‘Val’ Cleaver. While the precise con-
tents of these discussions remain unknown,
Clarke’s later account of the meeting had it end-
ing with Lewis commenting, ‘I’m sure you’re
very wicked people – but how dull it would be if
everyone was good’ (Clarke, 2003: 34). This
characterization of space exploration in terms
of good versus wicked thereby distils the debate
as an essentially moral conflict. Whereas Clarke
held the view that humanity must move into
outer space in order to fulfil its destiny as a
species (Bjørnvig, 2012), Lewis was of the
belief that the vast astronomical distances
Dunnett et al. 15
separating the planets represented ‘God’s quar-
antine regulations’ (Lewis, 1943: 73). As such,
Lewis can be understood as someone who
framed his understanding of outer space in spe-
cifically moral terms, drawing on his personal
spiritual and ethical convictions.
Whereas Lewis viewed space exploration as
a moral transgression, others have sought to
claim the inhabitation of outer space as a moral
right. Here we can look back to the Russian
Cosmism movement of the 1920s, which fol-
lowed the teachings of Nicolai Fedorov
(1829–1903) and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
(1857–1935). Drawing on Christian narratives
of the Second Coming as part of his Philosophy
of the Common Task, Fedorov announced that
‘conquest of the path to space is an absolute
imperative, imposed on us as a duty in prepara-
tion for the Resurrection’ (cited in Siddiqi,
2010: 80). Fedorov’s Anarchist-Biocosmist fol-
lowers declared that ‘the two basic human rights
[are] the right to live forever and the right to
unimpeded movement in interplanetary space’
(2010: 107). This philosophy of Cosmism was
seen as an antidote to Western Enlightenment
ideals of empiricism, rationalism and human-
ism, and found cultural expression in the New
Economic Policy era of Revolutionary Russia
through the paintings of avant-garde artists such
as Konstantin Yuon (1875–1958) and in science
fiction films such as Aelita: Queen of Mars
(1924).
These imagined futures view space explora-
tion in moral terms: as a basic human right
variously associated with religious narratives
and discourses of trans-humanism. Far from
being dismissed as quirky and irrelevant,
researchers such as Siddiqi have shown how
these cultures of outer space were important
pre-cursors to national space programmes,
with once-maligned figures such as Tsiolk-
ovsky being rehabilitated and celebrated as the
forefathers of the Soviet space programme.
Indeed, we might point towards connections
between Russian Cosmism and contemporary
transhumanism, whose adherents acclaim ‘the
converging influences of bioethics, science fic-
tion, life extension medicine, artificial intelli-
gence . . . space exploration [and] secular
humanism’ (Hughes, 2004: xviii). Like
Fedorov and the bio-Cosmists of revolutionary
Russia, here we can find adherents of a liberal
attitude to scientific and technological
advances in the space age, who see post-
terran futures for humankind in a moral and
ethical framework. Such framings of outer
space and space exploration are surely perti-
nent to the anticipation of future human activ-
ities in outer space.
The case studies highlighted in this commen-
tary show some of the ways in which outer space
might be dealt with from a cultural geography
perspective, particularly through the conceptual
frameworks of landscape and moral geogra-
phies. In treating outer space as a cultural land-
scape or as a moral and ethical space, we can
open up discourses of outer space to new critical
attention. This is particularly relevant in an age
in which a proliferation of new space ventures
look set to explore and exploit outer space in the
interests of those who are capable of sponsoring
such efforts. As such, it is just as important to
think through the ways in which outer space has
been conceptualized imaginatively, as well as
through direct encounters in human and robotic
spaceflight, a vision which Cosgrove (2008: 35)
foresaw as a ‘cosmography for the twenty-first
century . . . as extra-terrestrial space itself takes
on a more complex human geography’.
Oliver Dunnett
Queen’s University Belfast, UK
VI Nationalism and outer space
‘Atlantis Go’ . . . ‘Good luck to you and your crew
on the final flight of this true American icon.’
(NASA Mission Crew & Mission Specialist, Cited
in Shukman, 2011: Video)
16 Progress in Human Geography XX(X)
Tim Peake is seen preparing his space suit for his
spacewalk, the Union Jack is emblazoned, obvi-
ous with the white background, upon the suit’s left
arm – he is the first British astronaut to travel to
and live aboard the International Space Station.
His doing so has captured the nation’s imagina-
tion. (adapted from Briggs, 2016)
The geographies of outer space are inherently
linked to terrestrial understandings of nations
and nationalism. Recent research, by both social
scientists and geographers, has explored the
relationship between nationalism and a variety
of social practices and materialities (Merriman
and Jones, 2017; Militz and Schurr, 2016; Pen-
rose, 2011). My opening vignettes aim to reso-
nate with this interest, through the discourses of
nationalism, both visual and textual, included in
human spaceflight programmes, and what this
means on an embodied level, both individually
and collectively. Using the Space Shuttle pro-
gramme as an example, I look to demonstrate
why a geography of outer space matters to the
study of nationalism. First, I will consider some
of the iconography that surrounds human space-
flight and the discourses they encode. Second, I
will consider the importance of the embodied
aspect of nationalism (Closs Stephens, 2016;
Merriman and Jones, 2017; Militz and Schurr,
2016), particularly in line with contemporary
interest in non-representational geographies and
affect (Anderson, 2014).
Sage (2014) has argued how outer space
itself influenced the cultural imagination of the
United States from the mid-20th-century
through to the late-2000s. This leads to further
considerations around the agency of spaceflight
discourses and representations that emerged in
the United States, and beyond, of an ‘American’
spaceflight. Indeed, it can be argued that the
discourses encoded in spaceflight iconography
are important signifiers of the nation, in line
with Brunn’s assertion that when ‘states empha-
sise “the visual” . . . they inform and educate
their own populations and those beyond about
where they are, who they are, and what they are
about’ (2011: 19). Material cultures of human
spaceflight thus present an interesting avenue to
investigate the interests of a state reflecting and
reifying its own sense of identity.
To turn to an example of this I draw on some
research on the iconography of the Space Shut-
tle mission patches (NASA, 2011). Mission
patches were a tradition stemming from the mil-
itary, from where the first astronauts were
recruited. The patches were designed uniquely
for each mission, led by the astronauts with
input from other NASA officials. The patches
were then included in mission-related docu-
ments, on the suits of astronauts and in a variety
of Space Shuttle related publications. They
became commonly recognized symbols of the
US space program. The use of flags, stars and
eagles in many patches created an undoubtedly
‘American’ object.
Figure 1 speaks to this visual culture and the
relation that material cultures of human space-
flight have within a context of geopolitical posi-
tioning, in that the mission patches ask us to
reflect on the discourses that surround their pro-
duction. In asking these questions, we begin to
paint a picture of a patch’s intertextuality. The
patch was created during the Cold War and
STS-36’s mission objective was classified
owing to its operation by the US Department
of Defence. The images contained within the
patch, most prominently a bald eagle (the
national emblem of the USA) and an American
flag, taken within the context of a Cold War
Department of Defence mission, tell a particular
story of what the astronauts wanted to represent
their mission. This might be interpreted as the
symbolization of the critical role spaceflight
was seen to play in waging the Cold War, as
well as perpetuating an American manifest des-
tiny into outer space (Sage, 2014). The further
circulation of the patch into museums and its
consumption as a souvenir then begin to not
only reflect an image of American spaceflight
but also to reify the discourses encoded within.
Dunnett et al. 17
Attending to these visual cultures of outer
space is important and in particular the kinds
of images that become associated with space-
flight, within particular national contexts. This
work can more widely speak to debates around
how ‘state and non-state agents and institutions
reproduce social relations of “stateness”‘ (Pen-
rose, 2011: 439) towards outer space, which is
supposed to be ‘stateless’ (Collis, 2016). Begin-
ning with the mission patches opens up ques-
tions of what is symbolized in the images and
why, but also who designed them and how that
individual, or group, came to choose them. Geo-
graphers have been interested in these questions
with other material objects, for example bank-
notes (Penrose, 2011). Attending to visual cul-
tures of outer space might add new layers and
assemblages of discourses, that have become
entangled through the messiness of a space pro-
gram being for one nation, in my example the
USA, but at the same time being seen as a ben-
efit of and for humanity as a whole. How dis-
courses are presented in visual culture, in this
case mission patches, leads us to consider new
questions of nationalism in relation to a space
that is not territorialized but is a bounded entity
through terrestrial borders. There is much mile-
age still in considering discourses, and what
they are seen to show or relate to, and through
this we can attend to the cultures that human
spaceflight has created and is creating even now
in an increasingly globalized, and arguably
visual, world.
Discourses, though, can only tell us so much,
presenting a partial perspective from a respon-
dent’s or scholar’s reading of the object of
study. The question that follows on is what do
discourses of nationalism do? In response to
movements in geography around non-
representational theories (Anderson, 2014), the
nature of experience and of ‘being in the world’
has come into question, and its engagement with
a plethora of sub-disciplines in geography has
been called for, with political geographies and
nationalism being of particular relevance here
(Merriman and Jones, 2017; Muller, 2015). If a
discourse is a written, spoken or visual form of
communication, then how that is represented is
important. If we then accept, within the turn to
relational geographies, that ‘a representation
may function as a “small cog in an extra-
textual practice” (Deleuze, 1972 in Smith,
1998) . . . [then] we must pay attention to how
representations function affectively and how
affective life is imbued with representations’
(Anderson, 2014: 14). This trajectory of thought
has begun to take hold within geographic
enquiry into nationalism (Closs Stephens,
2016; Merriman and Jones, 2017; Militz and
Schurr, 2016).
Kennedy Space Center, Space Shuttle Atlantis
Exhibit
The music rises, as the model spacecraft that
opened the video swoops out of the screen
towards us, with the globe spread out as a back-
drop: ‘33 missions, 26 years, over 126 million
miles, Atlantis, welcome home’. The model
morphs into the Space Shuttle. The Shuttle comes
into focus at an oblique angle as it would be seen
Figure 1. STS-36 (1990) Mission Patch (NASA,2011).
18 Progress in Human Geography XX(X)
by an astronaut in orbit above the earth. The
music has reached its crescendo, the screen, sud-
denly no longer there, the actual shuttle is what
we were staring at. Whoops and hollers sound out
through the crowd, a voice chants ‘USA’, people
gasp, the atmosphere is ‘abuzz’, ablaze with exci-
tement as the group, steadily, walk toward it . . .
. . . we are standing toward the back of the
shuttle now, the exhaust end of the orbiter, the
red white and blue American flag is clear on the
inside of the open shuttle payload bay, another
emblazoned on its left side. Nationalistic pride
is clear for all to see, this was the United States’
Shuttle. But a little red maple leaf is present on the
robotic arm, ‘ha [chortles/snorts] look at Canada
trying to get in there. It’s our shuttle . . . ’. (adapted
from research notes; see also NASA, 2013)
Anderson and Ash have argued that the ‘more
everyday, banal, or quotidian atmospheres,
[ . . . ] may in fact be more important to the
ongoing maintenance of social life or the per-
formance of power and politics [than intense
atmospheres of fear or panic]’ (2015: 36). The
vignette above presents the idea that ‘national
forces, feelings and identifications can . . . be
approached as emergent and relational’ (Merri-
man and Jones, 2017: 613) through mediated
interactions between environments, material-
ities and individuals. The assemblage of the
music, the presentation of the shuttle above the
Earth, and its subsequent ‘welcome home’ to
the Florida museum, the centre of American
spaceflight, affected individuals to openly and
overtly express the nationalistic feeling this
assemblage had created within them through
patriotic shouts. This can be seen as the culmi-
nation of the effect of the Space Race through its
production of a Space Shuttle and the subse-
quent development of its capacity to be recog-
nized as an intrinsically American symbol.
Despite the overt flagging of American
nationalism, the international cooperation that
developed within spaceflight is also apparent,
with the appearance of the Canadian flag.
Amidst the affective atmosphere that was
created at the start of the exhibit, this was seen
as an ‘out-of-place’ flagging, an intrusion, in a
moment within a space that was felt to be solely
about American nationalism and American
spaceflight.
Since the retirement of the remaining fleet of
Space Shuttle orbiters, they have been donated
to museums across the USA. The Space Shuttle
fleet has thus become a new body within a con-
structed assemblage of remembering human
spaceflight, whilst also bringing together the
discourses that surround the broader legacy of
the program into its exhibits. Work in national-
ism has started to engage with this, with peo-
ple’s experience of spaces and places becoming
part of national affective atmospheres (Closs
Stephens, 2016) that contribute to a feeling of
national identity, to which, it has been argued,
outer space has been an integral contributor in
America (Sage, 2014).
This heritage of American human spaceflight
becomes entwined with national ideals of
‘American-ness’ and what that means. These
spaces of heritage and memorial, such as the
Kennedy Space Centre, where the vignette is
drawn from, is an example of the kind of work
geographers could, and have begun to consider
(Sage, 2014), and might speak to debates
ongoing in human geography around non-
representational geographies and nationalism
(Merriman and Jones, 2017). Human interest
and activity in outer space has created terrestrial
spaces of memory and thus inquiry, particularly
in museums, that contribute not only to an affec-
tive relation to and of outer space in our every-
day lives, but also reflect the relationship
between space and nationalism through their
display. In order to attend to these non-
representational interests, scholars are still
debating appropriate methods (Vannini, 2015).
Here I have presented building a layered per-
spective of place in order to get at the textures
of those spaces. This could involve ethnography
in order to consider a place’s materialities,
the images associated with the space, the
Dunnett et al. 19
performances of people and objects within it,
rules and regulations (implied and expected)
as well as the affects and feelings the researcher
encounters and has.
In this section, in relation to contemporary
debates and discussions, I have outlined some
of the ways nationalism is bound to the geogra-
phies of outer space, both through the discourses
and representations of the visual cultures of
outer space and our interpretations of these, but
also of where the terrestrial spaces of outer
space might expand our understandings of the
affective, embodied and non-representational
aspects of nationalism.
Andrew S. Maclaren
University of Aberdeen, UK
Acknowledgements
The editors of this forum would like to acknowledge
productive contributions to a thematic session at the
RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2016 on
‘Geographies of Outer Space’. We are also grateful
to the editorial board of this journal for their support
of this endeavour.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of inter-
est with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the
research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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